Exact Revenge

by Tim Green

  Bert shrugs and rips a thin branch from a tree. He strips off the leaves and starts to whip the seed heads off the grass growing out of the bank. I know if I offer to thumb wrestle him when I make the turn back onto the main road, he won’t even remember this place.

  The cottage is sagging and it smells damp in there under the shade of the trees. The front porch is coated with moss and even a few saplings struggle up out of the wood. The key is buried in a plastic bag at the base of a post. I dig it up with a flat rock and unlock the heavy front door. In the back of the kitchen is the pantry. I have a hard time swinging back the shelves. They seem to be fixed and, just as I was in the prison, I am gripped by the fear that I am the victim of a ruse. A film of sweat breaks out on my arms as I strain against the wood frame. Finally, their rusty hinges creak and give way and there behind the wall is the full-size door of a safe.

  I spin the knob, marveling at how slick it moves after all these years. It clicks, and I spin the second one until it clicks too. I press my weight against the lever and the door swings open. I flick on the flashlight and walk down into the cool dry space that is lined with narrow wooden boxes stacked upright like books on a shelf. My heart starts to thump when I see the metal strongboxes on a shelf in the corner. When I open them, I suck in my breath.

  Refracted light sparkles back at me in a million different hues. There are rubies and emeralds fat as walnuts, but mostly it’s diamonds set in rings, strung from necklaces, or mounted on precious crowns. I slip four of the biggest stones into my pockets.

  “Holy shit,” I say and sit down on the edge of a shelf that is labeled Picasso.

  I shine the light all around me. Crate after crate, lining the shelves, stacked three tiers high to the massive beams of the ceiling. If anything, Lester grossly underestimated the worth of his fortune.

  I sit for several minutes until the light-headed feeling passes, then I go back across the lake to Bert.

  “Find it?” he asks.

  “What?”

  He shrugs, tosses away his switch, and says, “Whatever you were looking for.”

  “Yeah,” I say, adjusting the brim of my cap down over my face. “I found it.”

  “My grandmother used to say when you found what you’re looking for, it’s time to start looking for something new,” Bert says.

  The sun is going down when I pull over the old Ford Bronco at a place called Byrd’s Marina. An old guy rents us a party boat for the rest of the day and gives us a map of the lake. I catch him staring at our hair. Bert’s is tied in a long ponytail and mine sweeps down to my shoulders. I’m still not used to the way white men look at Indians and I feel that my lips are tight. He puts an X on the spot where Bright Side is and tells us to watch the buoys.

  “There’s rocks all over this lake,” he says, forcing a smile. “Have fun.”

  I keep my head down, but take the wheel. Bert clutches a life jacket to his chest, the same way he does every time we cross into Canada by boat. A slight breeze coming from the direction of the sunset ripples the water. Lights begin to go on in random cabins around the lakeshore, but most of the places stay dark.

  Bright Side is a dinosaur. Big and old and missing a few pieces. The boathouse has been patched together with bald pressure-treated planks. The dock stretches out from a crumbling concrete pier that is cloaked in green moss. The hotel itself is freshly painted, but looks as if it has shifted from the effects of an earthquake. It’s easy to see why whoever runs it supplements their income by selling small bags of weed.

  We are docked and halfway up the lawn when someone skips down the front porch steps and jogs up to us. His hands are raised in the air in the act of surrender. I peer through the gloom from beneath the brim of my hat and my heart jerks to a stop.

  Grinning stupidly at us is a stooped and wrinkled version of Paul Russo. The bags under his red-rimmed eyes are darker now and his shoulders sag and curl forward at the same time. In an attempt to diminish his baldness, he has grown a long flap of dyed-black hair that he sweeps over the top of his head from one protruding ear to the other. His clothes look like they come from an L.L. Bean catalog.

  “Hey, guys,” he says with false cheerfulness. The wheezy sound of his voice losing its way in that big nose removes any doubt that this is the man from my past life. “I’ve got some guests in the lobby. Okay if we talk right here?”

  I can see Bert staring at me from the corner of my eye, but I keep my face angled down under the brim of the hat and my mouth shut. Bert starts to shift his feet.

  Russo laughs nervously through his nose and says, “I know you guys are here for the money and I’ve got most of it. Here. It’s right here…”

  He pulls a fat wad out of his pants pocket and begins peeling off bills, counting by twenty. When he’s finished, he holds the stack out to me.

  My bones ache. That’s how bad I want to show him my face. To see his eyes go blank. To smell him wet his pants when he stares back at this ghost. To savor his muffled shrieks as we take him away, out to the middle of the lake where I can choke him to death with my bare hands before we tie the anchor to his neck and sink him forever. I know we could do it. It would be easy.

  This is my first test.

  31

  WHEN I WAS BORN from the pipe in that prison wall, my second life began. It is a simple life with a single purpose. The lessons of my past life have stayed with me, but gone is the scattered focus. I am here to bloody my sword with the mess of everyone who destroyed Raymond White. I am no longer him and I am no longer Running Deer, or Quick Buck, or Quick Book. The joke is over.

  I will take the name of the son of the man who gave me this second life. I will not be overeager or impulsive. I will have ice in my veins because I have already been dead. I will now become Seth Cole.

  This is what I tell myself.

  I take the money pinched between Russo’s fingers and turn to go. I promise myself the time will soon come.

  “Tell Bonaparte the rest is coming,” he says after us, then we hear that nervous nasal laugh.

  “We’re not gonna bust him up some?” Bert says to me in a low tone.

  We are standing on the dock and I have the mooring line of the party boat in my hands. Its aluminum pontoons ring hollow as they bump against the wood. A yellow bulb in a broken fixture on the wall of the boathouse glows dully and insects swirl through its beams.

  I tilt my hat back and look up at Bert so he can see my eyes.

  “Do you want a job?” I ask.

  Bert giggles and looks around.

  “What do you mean?” he says. “I got a job.”

  “You want another? You want to work for me?”

  “You’re not gonna take that money?” he says, his eyebrows furrowing.

  “I’ll pay it back,” I say. “Don’t worry about that. I’ll pay it back double by the end of the week. You want a job?”

  “Workin’ for you?” he says. “Just you?”

  “Just me.”

  “Yeah,” Bert says, smiling big, the slits of his eyes nearly invisible above those big round cheeks. “I want that job.”

  I reach out and squeeze his thick arm and we step onto the boat.

  I drive all night to just outside New York City, where we flop down in a motel under the shadow of Bear Mountain. We sleep until midmorning, then go into Manhattan. Bert waits in the truck while I go into Zegna on Fifth Avenue and buy a dark blue suit, shoes, a shirt, and a tie with Russo’s money. I step out onto the sidewalk and see that Bert doesn’t recognize me without the Bills hat and frumpy clothes that I carry in a Zegna shopping bag.

  I go around the corner to a hairstylist and pay for a hundred-dollar trim, pick up a fake Cartier watch on the street, then have Bert drive me to a 49th Street diamond shop. I deal my stones in the backroom with a Hasidic grandfather who gives me a briefcase half full of crisp hundreds banded together in narrow paper sleeves that read: $10,000.

  The old man stares up only briefly from beneath his black felt hat
and thick round glasses before he tells me where I can get some fake identification made up. The next stop is Western Union so I can wire Bonaparte notice of our respectful termination along with Russo’s money in full plus another equal amount as interest for the day’s use.

  We eat bulging pastrami sandwiches at Katz’s Deli before circling the Bronco back to the garment district, where hopefully they’re finished making up my identification. For ten thousand dollars cash, I get a valid Mississippi driver’s license, a library card from the Oxford Public Library, and a Social Security card all bearing the name of Lester’s dead and long-forgotten son. I give the guy one of the packets of hundreds from the diamond merchant, then Bert and I leave the city.

  We hire some strong young kids from a guy Bert knows at the Turning Stone Casino, the Oneida Indian Reservation casino just west of Utica. I rent a U-Haul with a twenty-four-foot van and buy three sets of handheld radios along with a six-horse Johnson outboard motor. It’s ten o’clock, pitch black, with the wind promising rain when we post two of the kids along Uncas Road with radios to keep a lookout.

  It takes four hours to empty the cottage vault into the truck. During the last half-hour, it begins to rain. I give the kids each ten one-hundred-dollar bills and they grin all the way back to Turning Stone. After we drop them off, Bert and I get a start on our drive back to New York City, stopping when we get to a motel outside Hamilton and hurrying inside to get out of the spattering rain.

  The next day, the sky is clear. We find a stout-looking storage facility in one of the sprawling new suburbs of Bergen County across the line into New Jersey. It takes me three days to sell a Cézanne for three hundred and fifty thousand. I know I’m being taken, but it’s just one painting, and I want to get out to Los Angeles to begin my transformation.

  I use the two months it takes my face to recover from surgery to enhance the knowledge Lester has already given me about moving rare and missing works of art and jewels. I meet buyers from Japan, Germany, France, England, and Indonesia. I get some credit cards going and some brokerage accounts too.

  I send Bert back to New Jersey to rent a modest house close to where my paintings are stored. I have a stop to make that I want to do alone. I get off the plane at Syracuse with my head held high, confident I won’t be recognized. My eyes will always be the same liquid brown as Raymond White’s, but the skin around them has been tightened. My chin is broader than his was and my nose is smaller and straighter.

  To return before my surgery would have been stupid. The same thing goes for trying to contact my father. I’m sure Raymond White is still a wanted man and not enough time has gone by for the authorities not to be keeping an eye on the only person in the world who he was connected to.

  As I approach the airport security doors, I look up and see the camera. I swallow my spit and quickly take my wallet from my suit coat pocket and look down at it, pretending fascination with its contents as I pass by the screening station and through the doors. I slide the wallet back inside my coat and look around at the crowd of people waiting for family and friends who have arrived on the same flight I was on. It’s a lonely feeling to see their eager faces and have their eyes slip right on past me.

  I am downstairs and standing in line at the Hertz counter when I see two uniformed police walking toward me. Their faces are set in concrete and they are scanning the terminal. When the one with the brown crew cut meets my eyes, he taps his partner and they head my way. My heart jumps and my muscles go tense. I look around. There are enough people milling about that I think I could get out of the building, but where I’d go from there, I have no idea. I would have to jack someone’s car. It would end in a mad chase, probably with a bullet in my spinning head. Before I can act, they are here.

  “Excuse me,” the crew cut says, “are you Seth Cole?”

  “Yes.”

  The cop smiles in a knowing way and says, “Thought so. You dropped your wallet upstairs.”

  He is holding the wallet out to me. I reach out and take it. They stare at me with their smiles fading. When I finally sense the tension, I thank them, and thank them again. Their smiles return. They nod and they walk away.

  I rent a Cadillac and drive out to my father’s. In the weeds that have grown up around the mailbox is a crooked Realtor’s sign. I grip the wheel and speed up the hill with rocks clattering off the undercarriage as I search the trees for the lines of the house. There are no vehicles in the driveway, and a blanket of leaves from last autumn has been piled up into the corners of the porch. A torn window screen wafts gently in the breeze.

  It’s a warm day for October. Indian summer. My armpits sweat, and I sniff at the unfamiliar scent of mothballs in the stuffy air. I peer through the window and the spiderwebs. None of the furniture is familiar. Broken children’s toys are scattered about the dirty floor. My spirits are lifted though when the roar of a blast soars over the treetops from the direction of the quarry. I jump down off the steps and speed around the hill, the Cadillac trailing dust in the heat.

  The old office trailer is sunken and buried in a sea of saplings and high grass, but down in the quarry I see men in lime green hard hats moving about. The old payloader lies with its back broken in a rusted heap beside the road, but I see fresh yellow equipment crawling like monstrous beetles up ahead. It’s obvious there is money being made here, and it’s not at all unlikely that my dad finally moved out of the woods.

  I don’t see him, or Black Turtle, but there is a man with plans spread out over the hood of a Chevy pickup who is obviously in charge. Yellow foam plugs peek out of his ears. His hair and mustache are powdered with stone dust the way my father’s always were. He stares up at me from behind his safety goggles and frowns.

  “This is a hard hat area,” he says. “Who are you?”

  “I’m…” I say, frozen and sick at how close I came to calling myself Raymond White, “looking for Kevin White.”

  “Who?” the foreman says, his powdered eyebrows knitted.

  A gray bearded man in overalls and leathery skin comes around to my side of the pickup and says to the foreman, “The guy used to own this place. Remember? Guy who froze to death?”

  “You got me,” the foreman says, tilting back his lime green hardhat and dabbing at his brow with the back of his hand.

  My head feels hollow and I hear a sound like waterfalls. I’ve lost my sense of standing upright.

  “Hey, fella. You okay?”

  “You sure?” I ask. “Did you know him?”

  “Not really,” the older man says. “Just remember it in the papers back in, I don’t know, 1990 or something, about him having his power cut off middle of January. Didn’t pay his bills, they said. Power company took hell for it anyway…

  “I remember because guys used to kid each other when we first started working this place,” he says, nodding his head toward the rusty hulk on the road above us. “There was an old Indian who used to come around-”

  “Black Turtle?”

  “Yeah, I think that was it. He died too, not long after. Anyway, he said you could see that Kevin White guy’s ghost on that old payloader sometimes after dark. Well, that got them all going. You know how rock guys are.”

  “Rocks in their heads, half of ’em,” the foreman says.

  “They say it’s not a bad way to go,” the older man says. “Say you start feeling real warm and then you just kind of go to sleep.”

  I hear him, but my eyes are on the payloader, broken and flaky. The air above the seat glimmers and I squint my eyes, looking for his shape. But it’s only the heat from the brown metal and the weeds, making tracks for the cooler regions of the blue sky. I wish my hatred had a vent like that.

  My father is gone. Even his ghost.

  32

  THE SNOW IN UPSTATE NEW YORK is piled high by the time I return. It’s taken me that long to turn Lester’s stash into a massive portfolio of cash and stocks and bonds. Bert is driving me in a black Lincoln Navigator and he has to use four-wheel drive
from the minute we leave the Thruway. The slush from the morning’s snow is four inches deep. At my feet is a suitcase with a million dollars in cash as well as a street-bought Smith amp; Wesson.357 with a silencer attached.

  Bert’s hair is cut short now and he wears an expensive tan shearling coat that makes him look even bigger than he already is. I wear a black leather trench coat, even though it’s not as warm. It matches my driving gloves and looks good with the full black beard and mustache I’ve grown. My hair is still long, but slicked back tight to my head. Paul Russo will be the first person I’ll meet up close, in the light, who really knew Raymond White.

  Byrd’s, the same place that rented us the party boat last summer, rents snowmobiles in the winter. Bert has called ahead, and two red-and-black machines that look like they came out of Star Wars are waiting for us in the middle of the plowed lot. The sky is bitter and bleached and the sun shows through in only a pale yellow wash. The same old guy comes outside with his smoky breath trailing him. He gives us helmets to use, and I see him staring at the Ferragamo shoes on my feet.

  “You going like that?” he says, nodding toward the shoes and the pant legs of my suit.

  I don’t know what he’s looking at. He’s got a Valvoline cap on his head and his nose and ears are red like beets from the cold. I ease the helmet down over my slick hair and get onto the snowmobile. Bert loads up two overnight bags and my briefcase on the back of his snowmobile, then shells out the cash for the machines. I rev my engine until he’s mounted up, then we shoot across the street and out onto the frozen lake.

  In the open stretches, I grip the accelerator tight. The machine shakes and swerves, floating, almost out of control. Snow crystals whip up under the edge of my helmet. I look down at the speedometer. The needle pushes past eighty and the sensation of speed gets my heart going.

  There are other snow machines lined up on the bank outside the old hotel. Heavy gray smoke pours out from three different chimneys. Inside, it’s warm and I can smell cinnamon and burning wood. Russo greets us with a clap of his hands. He wears a green sweater with a line of white reindeers knit across the front. His pale neck sticks out of the collar like a broomstick. The veins in his big nose and even his protruding ears are angry from alcohol and his breath smells like cheap scotch.